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ART; Group Show at a New Gallery

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THE Washington Street Gallery, which opened last October, is a center for the arts without the trappings that normally go with such enterprises.

For one thing, it is housed in a pre-Civil War building that looks its age, with an all-wood interior like a clipper ship and a staircase angled as steeply as those on Mayan temples. For another thing, the gallery supports itself on the dues paid by its members - 25 of them to date.

In addition, the premises double as living quarters for their director, Barbara Sandberg-Morgan, who, in turn, doubles as professor of theater at William Paterson College. All in all, it is a loft setup authentic in all respects, from the cats that patrol it to the mildly bohemian atmosphere that pervades it. Small wonder that the place attracts visitors on the two days a week it is open - Thursdays and Sundays, from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.

The present attraction is ''The Feast,'' a group show organized by James A. Brown, an artist known for his expressionistic combinations of painting and sculpture, and also a teacher at Paterson. Mr. Brown's choices are seven - Manuel Acevedo, Willie Cole, Giza Daniels-Endesha, Nadine Delawrence, Manuel Macarrulla, Paul Powell and Bisa Washington. All have shown in Manhattan as well as New Jersey, and all, save Mr. Macarrulla, are represented by sculptures or works incorporating three-dimensional elements.

Bisa Washington contributes two of her all-black relief-effigies. In the larger and more figural of them, the contours are defined by wire bound in tape, the forms by fabric and fiber, and attached to one side is a machete. The second piece is a hollow form that is strung with the bound wire and lined with newspapers bearing headlines about Africa and Nelson Mandela, and again a machete hangs alongside. The work is menacing, but its effect would be more profound were the artist able to restrain her talent for the theatrical.

Paul Powell's installation, ''Untitled Passages,'' involves a relief painting of a man's silhouette in red surrounded by various geometrical shapes, some painted, others left bare. The floor in front of this is covered with a checkerboard of vinyl tiles that are painted or scored with animals' heads and slogans like ''Flat, Black and Homeless.''

Reposing on and around the tiles are various objects, including a chair, two jars of water and a tall cylinder made of raw wood slats. It is an orderly construction, but the viewer groping for a train of thought finds only vague allusions to human and, perhaps, personal suffering.

In another piece, Mr. Powell expresses his mood more clearly but in a manner that is too close to the late Jean-Michel Basquiat's for comfort. That is to say, the painting in the installation is a white board covered with black graffiti - signs, symbols, words - and ornamented with one or two arabesques of stained wood. Five beer bottles with black images printed on white labels stand on top of the image and one is parked in front of it, on a block. The artist has a good spatial sense, but his thoughts and emotions seem stuck in a bottleneck.

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The congestion in Giza Daniels-Endesha's art is physical. This may be because his installations, crammed with paintings, objects, fur, feathers, fabric and the like, are missing the theatrical performances that, the artist says in his statement, ''give them life.'' Certainly, the description of ''Gamaa''would be more effective spoken than it is written - in a Southern dialect yet.

These rambling assemblages have their moments - bottles filled with colored rice, a small figure dangling from an upside-down gibbet and so forth. But the totality resembles street life with its fragmentary conversations and bursts of action alternating with stretches of aimlessness. It is easy to see why art and the process of making it are one and the same thing for Mr. Daniels-Endesha.

In a new departure, Manuel Acevedo combines his photographs with wood constructions. One of his best efforts, the scene of a gun freak sitting with his treasures in a kitchen, is mounted on a chunky cross dabbed with black and gold paint, and the eye, it seems, of the same model, enlarged, fills the spyhole of a large door painted cubistically with white circles. The Bible says not to pour new wine into old bottles, and it is advice that applies equally to old pictures in new mounts.

Manuel Macarrulla is his best in a dour moonlit landscape, where black goats frolic, playing drums and the pipes of Pan, and, seemingly, doom waits in the surrounding jungle. But when making a political point, as in the Fellini-esque scene of a tropical street crowded with masked revelers, the painter loses his cool sense of color and gets fussy.

Once again, the sculptor Willie Cole forswears his gift for making objects in favor of assemblages with a message. Eight telephones dismembered to look like faces with Mickey Mouse ears and fitted with flashing lights occupy a shelf and, below them, are four more without lights. Nearby hangs ''Gun Mobile,'' which consists of shapes resembling hot plates that are welded together and ornamented with toy pistols. Mr. Cole may be aiming at the world, but he winds up punishing his own considerable talent.

Nadine Delawrence cuts thick metal plates into ribbons and flanges, which she organizes into abstractions reminiscent of tropical plant growths. She then hangs them on the wall in company with smaller shapes - a pair of horizontal parentheses enclosing a skein of wire, a box stained blue-green surmounting another wire skein. In a show fraught with anxiety and argument, Ms. Delawrence's is the only contribution to appear serene.